Chapter 71: Sandbox World
Translated by Addis of Exiled Rebels Scanlations
Editor: PlumSauce
John vaporized into mist, Lathander relied on magic, and Carl transformed into a mouse to slip into the building. He couldn’t morph like John; shrinking into a mouse was the best he could manage. At first, everyone in the Association had marveled — why a mouse and not a traditional bat?
The telecom company’s office building appeared normal at night. Lathander produced a detection rod made of mistletoe, shaped like a Y, capable of pointing toward active magic.
“Looks like we need to go down,” Lathander said. “Secrets people don’t want seen are almost always in basements.”
Following the rod’s guidance, the three descended the stairs floor by floor. Their eyes adapted perfectly to the dark, so no light was needed.
The building had many basement levels — at least four could be seen from the stairwell. The first basement floor housed a few restaurants, the second basement floor contained equipment rooms, and below that was the garage.
“I can’t imagine what could be below the garage,” Carl said from the stairs, peering down. There were at least five more levels from here.
“Maybe…more garages?” Lathander guessed, continuing to follow the rod downward.
John knew this wasn’t normal. An underground parking garage didn’t justify eight or nine underground floors. What building would be designed like that?
The cell phone signal disappeared. The seemingly bottomless basement reminded John of the novel Stairway to Hell, where an elevator descended from the upper floors straight into hell… At that thought, he suddenly realized something he had overlooked.
On the sixth basement floor, John stepped out of the stairwell and found the elevator gone. In its place was a dusty empty space.
The bottom of an elevator shaft couldn’t just rest on a hollow floor. Something was wrong.
John informed his two companions, then returned upstairs to check, only to discover that the floors above weren’t part of the telecom building anymore — they were part of the abandoned empty factory.
The basement connected two locations: one is the West Bay City office building, the other is the suburban factory — where Lizbeth and Carolyn had disappeared.
When trying to get in touch with Lathander, even the walkie-talkies failed. John retraced his steps, but Lathander and Carl were gone.
He tried sending a feather charm, unsure if it would reach them. After searching the equipment rooms and garage, he re-entered what was now the factory’s fourth and fifth basement floors. Footprints crisscrossed the stairways — people had been here before, and quite a few. The platform of the sixth basement floor was littered with candy wrappers. Familiar ones. Carolyn often carried that kind of candy.
John donned insulated gloves and flicked out a silver sabre from a marker-shaped handle.
The seventh basement floor seemed to be the last level. No more stairs led down. A worn-out sign beside a door read: “Experiment Pool 001.”
“Pool?” John frowned and cautiously pushed the door open.
A blinding white light spilled into the stairwell. Instinctively, John shut his eyes and shielded his face with his arm.
The light vanished in less than a second. Though intense, it carried no warmth.
John peered carefully and saw himself standing on a rural country path. It was deep night; a full moon hung overhead, illuminating a wide field with no buildings in sight. His first instinct was to check his phone for satellite positioning. There was no signal, no network connection, though the timer and compass apps still worked.
Behind him was a small house made of mud bricks and wood, resembling an Irish shepherd’s hut. The hut had no door. From the angle, John realized he had just emerged from it.
He was grateful to be a bloodkin and not human. He moved swiftly without light, heading toward flatter terrain, and soon spotted flickering lights in the distance.
A tiny village appeared far off. The light seemed from torches in a square rather than lamps. Oddly, there were no power lines nearby. Could people really still live without electricity?
John approached cautiously through the shadows, checking for danger. The village was quiet. Houses were dilapidated, and the stables contained no animals.
He slipped into one house. For a moment, it felt like he was inside a fantasy role-playing game — this wasn’t the modern world. The interior had a medieval agrarian-hunting style: dried meat and antlers hung on the walls, and a thick, crude pot rested on a cold stove.
No paper objects were present. The occupants were likely illiterate. As John photographed the interior, the bushes outside a wooden window creaked — someone was moving.
He morphed into mist, slipping through a window crack. From a distance, he saw a figure in a hooded jacket moving along a row of houses toward the torch-lit square.
The person was indeed wearing a hooded jacket, a contemporary item. John hid in the shadows, noticing a small camping tent in the square, into which the hooded figure entered.
On the tent was a symbol like a family crest: two hands, one large and one small, clasping a serpent staff. Beneath, arched letters surprised John: Engrity Pharmaceuticals.
Hovering near the tent, he clearly heard a conversation inside.
“The breaches are getting bigger. I’m worried the police will notice,” a man said.
“And what if they do? What can the police report, anyway? They’d just be suspended and sent to see a shrink,” the woman replied, speaking with a slight Latin American accent.
“A Ranger already discovered it — accidentally. Hikers or police could stumble in at any moment. We need to act fast. This has been dragging on for almost a year.”
John’s curiosity peaked. What exactly had been dragging on for nearly a year? He continued to listen silently.
“The boss’s mess is really hard to clean up,” the woman said. “This world is way too real. Even though it’s been shrinking, it’s still vast, and we simply don’t have enough people.”
“Now there are more of us,” the man replied. “Rangers have come in. They probably found monsters in the wild, which led them to the breach’s entrance. That works in our favor — they’ll kill any monster they can see, saving us the effort.”
So the rumors were true: monsters were wandering near the abandoned factory, and yes, they came from the factory — but from another space inside it. And that space had two exits.
“Besides the dead ones, a lot got out…” the man continued. “The old factory side is manageable; there are Rangers in the nearby wilderness. But the West Bay City exit… that’s in the city center.”
“So far, nothing’s happened. Someone will handle it. You know the Unthreatening Creature Protection Association has an office in West Bay City. They’ve got plenty of exorcists…”
John was surprised to hear that. It seemed they knew everything about this space and how events might unfold.
He considered revealing himself, entering to ask questions — about Lizbeth, Carolyn, Carl, and Lathander. Just as he was about to change back his body, the man in the tent asked, “What time is it? Will they show up?”
The woman flipped through some items. “It’s past midnight. On every full moon, that gang of giant bat-people raids this village. They’ll come tonight too. That’s how it was designed. Unless they all found an exit and left, or they’re all dead.”
“Let’s hope they’re all dead,” the man said, loading a magazine into his gun.
Giant bat-people? John searched his memory. He had never heard of this species — no cases, no descriptions, not even the name. And that full moon…but today wasn’t the full moon. Time here didn’t match the outside world.
John took another look at the moon. It hung unnaturally large, like it had been photographed with a telephoto lens. Along the edge of the white moon, two black backlit spots appeared, then three, growing larger…
They weren’t spots — they were flying creatures.
John pulled back a short distance from the tent, and reverted his body back to watch the sky.
Spiraling closer were creatures that were at least eight feet tall with jet-black bodies, broad bat wings, and clawed feet. Their faces resembled night owls, eyes darting around as if hunting.
So these were the giant bat-people. John shouted toward the tent, “Giant bat-people! They’re here!”
“Who the hell are you?!” the man shouted, running out while brandishing a gun. He was a Black man in his thirties, shocked to see someone so close.
“Never mind who I am!” John opened his silver blade. “Your situational awareness is awful! You only noticed me now… But never mind that, the giant bat-people are here!”
By the time he spoke, the monsters had circled overhead. One screeched like a commander, and they dove toward the ground from different directions.
Within the few seconds it took the pair from the tent to undo the safety and fire their guns, John had already severed the head of the nearest one and blocked a swooping strike from another.
The humans were stunned. All they could see were the golden-brown afterimages of John’s clothing in the silver light, unable to track his exact actions.
“What are you!?” the man shouted again.
“Never mind what I am! Shoot!” John replied, tripping a monster as he swung.
They killed five in total. The rest retreated, screeching, flying out of shooting range.
“Now can you tell me who you are?” the man asked cautiously. “I’m guessing…you’re a Ranger?”
The woman aimed her gun at John. “No. He’s not human. No human moves like that.” She was a tanned Latina and the one John had noticed in the hooded jacket earlier.
“Look at his weapon,” the man said, pointing to John’s silver sabre. “It’s a hunter’s or exorcist’s weapon.”
“But he’s wearing gloves!” the woman observed, keenly. She knew only someone who couldn’t touch a weapon of sacred power would need insulated gloves.
John sheathed the sabre, pointing to a small badge on his left collar.
“You’re with the Unthreatening Creature Protection Association? What are you?” the woman asked.
“Vampire. Call me John.”
“‘John’ is such a common fake name.”
“It’s really my name!”
“I’m Mark,” the man said, lowering the girl’s gun. “You came here to hunt monsters?”
She wanted to argue, but Mark whispered, “He’s not of this world. Look at his clothes and how he talks.”
“I’m looking for colleagues,” John said. “They disappeared from the abandoned factory with some Rangers. You know the outside is an abandoned factory, right?”
The woman nodded. “Yes. That’s the original research pool entrance. We came in from there too. You can call me Alette.”
“Have you seen anyone who might be my colleagues?”
“I only saw one person before,” Alette said. “Somewhere near a canyon to the south. He wasn’t carrying much — looked like an ordinary civilian who wandered in by accident.”
That definitely wasn’t Carl or Lathander. John asked, “Have you seen two girls? One with black hair, one with blonde… They were carrying weapons like the one I have.”
Mark and Alette shook their heads. They explained that this space could be entered from either the West Bay City building or the abandoned factory. Even if John and his colleagues came in one after another, they could appear in entirely different locations. The exits were scattered as well and never overlapped with the entry points.
John thought this was a bit like Sidov the demon’s Black Mist Inn. He asked, “Can you explain what this place actually is? And…those giant bat-people? What are they?”
“It’s a long story,” Mark shrugged. “To keep it simple, think of this place as…a giant, real-world sandbox.”
“A sandbox?”
“Yeah. Like a scale model of property development with land, trees, little houses…”
“Can you tell me the longer version? I don’t mind.”
Mark was about to start when Alette suddenly screamed and yanked his arm.
John, standing with the moon behind him, turned around — and froze. Against the backlight, he saw swarms of black creatures. At first, a dozen; then clouds of them appeared, so dense they nearly blocked the huge moon.
“Are those…cockroaches? If I see one, there must be ten out of sight?” John murmured, dazed.
“No way!” Alette shouted. “There should only be about ten giant bat-people according to the original design!”
“So…there are a hundred more out of sight?”
“I didn’t say that! Damn it! But…looks like there really are a hundred!”
She and Mark fired into the sky, though whether they hit anything was uncertain. Even with John’s speed, there was no way to protect the humans and fight so many monsters at once. He made a split-second decision: run with the two humans toward the forested area outside the village.
In the dim light, humans might not notice, but John could vaguely see thin lines on the ground — like some sort of threads. Looking back at the approaching monsters, he saw similar lines running along the bases of the nearby houses. They were drawn in silver ink, some weighed down with stones in a pattern.
Spell traces? No time to study further. After slashing a monster closing in on the humans, he drew a flare gun from his waist — a device that could project a magical barrier, like the one Erica from the front desk had used. There was no way to outrun the overwhelming swarm; John planned to hold them off with the force field for a moment and buy time.
He pressed the humans close, and the three of them dove into the forest underbrush. As he prepared to open the barrier, he noticed, out of the corner of his eye, more silver lines at his feet — they were just outside its protective range.
The ground rumbled like a massive guillotine slicing through the earth.
The silver runes were only inches from John’s feet. Within their radius, every inch of ground erupted in vertical, fountain-like pillars of light, filling almost the entire village. Most of the pursuing giant bat-people were trapped; only a few escaped, paralyzed with terror.
The village floor had become a wide, holy magical pinboard, and within its range, the creatures were impaled, writhing in the light.
John recoiled from fright, as he was almost stepping into the rune’s range himself.
He hadn’t noticed when entering the village, but now it was clear: this place had long been prepared with some kind of sacred magical array, the caster having done all the work and waiting only for the trigger.
The light lasted about thirty seconds. Most of the giant bat-people were struck down. Mark and Alette fired at any that slipped through; John intercepted a nearby one outside the array.
As he examined the creatures’ bodies, he heard Alette call into the trees, “You? Did you cast this?”
John assumed Lizbeth or Carolyn was nearby. But a man stepped from the underbrush. Not Lizbeth. Mark and Alette had said they had seen him in the southern canyon before, then he vanished. He emerged clearly under the moonlight — at least to John’s bloodkin vision — despite the swaying shadows.
John was rooted to the spot. He hadn’t expected to see him. No sense or premonition had warned him.
“Coraci?” John walked forward, his steps slightly shaky. His voice was low, and the distance between them was over ten feet. He wasn’t sure if Coraci could hear him.
Deville Coraci was empty-handed, walking as casually as if strolling through the city. He wore a casual suit with black jeans, a slightly oversized shirt, his wavy black hair tousled by branches. He hadn’t changed in three years — still gentle, refined, smiling.
“John,” he responded softly.
Author’s Note:
Told you I couldn’t keep things bottled up…
…Three years later, and they meet again so soon~
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